by Brad Thor
The woman shook her head and smiled. “In these temperatures? It may not look far on a map, but there aren’t enough reindeer skins in the entire Oblast to keep you from freezing to death out there.”
“It’s a plan,” he replied, trying to ignore the pain and smiling back. “I didn’t say it was a good one.”
Lowering his shirt, she took a step back and said, “You definitely need antibiotics. I’d also recommend we begin a course of rabies injections. And judging by your other injuries, I believe painkillers would also be in order.”
Harvath appreciated her assistance, but there was something he needed even more. “Can you help me get to the border? If you can, I promise to make it worth your while.”
CHAPTER 33
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After two hours of searching, Teplov’s men had found Josef. His back was broken and he was suffering from frostbite and severe hypothermia, but he was alive.
As the transport plane had tumbled through the forest, breaking apart, he had been sucked out. Unable to walk, he had clawed a trench in the snow and had used seat cushions and other debris to insulate himself. Dragging himself inside, he had done the only thing he could do at that point—he had waited for rescue.
When word of Josef’s discovery broke over the radio, Teplov had rushed to his friend’s location. He was relieved to see him alive, if just barely. The man, though, was hovering on the edge of consciousness and obviously in great pain.
Despite Minayev’s earlier orders about the allocation of resources, Teplov redirected the cargo helicopter and two of his mercenaries to transport Josef back to the air base for emergency medical attention.
Before they took off, Teplov tried to ask him if he knew what had happened and where Harvath might be. Josef was unable to answer.
Shielding his face from the hail of crystalline snow, he stood back and watched as the helicopter lifted off and disappeared into the distance.
The revelation that Josef was still alive had only deepened his resolve to track down Harvath. A couple of hours later, they had a lead.
As the area was so heavily wooded, Teplov and his team had to be dropped some distance away and snowshoe in. But it had been worth it.
Inside a cabin, they had found the body of an old Sámi with a blanket pulled up over his face. His clothes were missing, but in a pile on the floor near the fireplace was a damp Spetsnaz uniform. Harvath had been here.
In addition to helping himself to the old man’s clothes and canned food, he also appeared to have helped himself to the Sámi’s snowmobile.
Blowing snow had almost completely erased the tracks—only a whisper of a trail remained. Teplov and his men followed it.
A couple of hundred meters into the trees, there was another carnage of wolves.
Several lay dead by what looked like shotgun blasts. Another—a much larger black wolf—looked as if it had been gutted with some kind of blade. The snow was covered with blood.
Marking the direction the snowmobile had taken from there, Teplov radioed one helicopter to go search, and the other, which had returned from dropping off Josef, to pick him and his men up where they had been dropped off.
As they trekked back to the landing zone, Teplov consulted his GPS unit. Harvath was headed west, likely for the border. He had a snowmobile, a shotgun, and a modicum of other supplies. Did he have enough, though, to get him all the way? What’s more, what kind of shape was he in?
Considering how far he had come from the crash site and how much havoc he had caused, Teplov decided he was doing well enough to be dangerous.
The only other question he had was how long Harvath had been on the run with the snowmobile. If he could answer that, it would go a long way toward tracking him down.
Night was falling, and Teplov had no idea how much fuel Harvath had. It was going to get much colder. If he was going to resupply or rest for the night, where might he do that?
Teplov consulted his GPS. If Harvath maintained his course, the nearest habitation was a town approximately forty kilometers away.
He had to have known that he would stand out significantly from the local population. Merely putting on someone else’s clothing wouldn’t be enough to disguise him. The people of the Oblast could recognize an outsider quite easily. That would go double for an American.
Harvath’s only chance was to stay out of sight. He would be looking for a farm, another cabin, or some sort of abandoned property where he could get warm and, if need be, get food for himself and fuel for the snowmobile.
At the very least, Teplov now knew how Harvath was traveling and in which direction. That was a dramatic improvement.
Finding the needle was the easy part. Identifying the haystack was where the challenge lay.
But now he had his haystack. All he and his men needed to do was to get out their pitchforks and rip it apart. Scot Harvath didn’t stand a chance.
CHAPTER 34
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ABOVE THE ATLANTIC
The Gulfstream G650 ER extended-range jet was capable of Mach 0.925, more than seven hundred miles per hour. But, in addition to its speed, its fuel capacity had made it The Carlton Group’s preferred aircraft.
Fully fueled, it had a range of seventy-five hundred nautical miles. That meant it could do Hong Kong to New York nonstop. At about half the distance, Washington, D.C., to Helsinki, Finland, was even easier.
In addition to its range and speed, the aircraft was incredibly luxurious. It boasted a premium leather couch, handcrafted oversized reclining seats, sixteen panoramic windows, designer carpeting, fold-out flatscreen displays, LED lighting, a bathroom with a shower, and a full galley with a convection oven, wet bar, and even an espresso machine.
The private plane could sleep ten people and had voluminous cargo space—key requirements when sending a high-end tactical team downrange.
“This is a joke, right?” said the voice of Tyler Staelin as he opened the oven. “Who stocks a seventy-million-dollar plane with fucking pizza?”
The five-foot-ten Staelin was a former Tier One operator from the “Unit,” or Delta Force, as it was more popularly known. Hailing from downstate Illinois, the experienced thirty-nine-year-old played double duty as the team’s medic. An avid reader, he never travelled with less than three books.
“I did,” replied Chase Palmer. “Nobody wanted to take responsibility for catering, so I stepped up. Next time, don’t ignore my texts.”
A native Texan in his early thirties, Chase looked so similar to Harvath that the two were often asked if they were brothers.
He had been the youngest operator ever admitted to Delta, and his exploits were legendary—filling multiple hard drives at the Department of Defense. His teammates had loosely nicknamed him “AK,” for Ass Kicker, but after he had used an empty AK-47 to bluff six enemy fighters into surrender in Afghanistan, it stuck.
“You never texted me,” Staelin asserted as he pulled out his phone and scrolled through his messages. When he got to the ones from Chase, his expression changed. “My bad.”
“Apology accepted. By the way, there’s a warming drawer behind you. You might want to take a peek.”
Staelin did, and a smile spread across his face. “Sirloins?”
“You’re welcome,” Chase replied.
Normally, Harvath handled this stuff. He was a detail guy, and secretly they all believed he was a bit of a control freak. He liked to act as if he didn’t care about what anyone thought, but they knew better. Harvath was a good man who cared deeply about the people around him. That was yet another reason why the events of the last several days had been so difficult.
The news that the Old Man, Lydia Ryan, and Lara Cordero had been murdered came as a shock to the entire team. The fact that Harvath had gone missing and that police in New Hampshire were actually considering him a suspect made them all want to throat-punch somebody. Then, Nicholas had called them into HQ for a briefing.
At
each seat at the conference table, he had placed a copy of the Old Man’s succession plan. Like Nicholas, Carlton had also been a no-bullshit, detail guy.
It was unnecessary. If Nicholas had said “Reed and Lydia are gone. We don’t know where Harvath is. Until further notice, I have been left in charge,” the team would have believed him.
But because of his dishonorable past, Nicholas often felt unworthy around them. He respected their courage and integrity, and worked hard to earn their respect in return. In so doing, he committed to always being one hundred percent transparent with them, and held nothing back in his briefings.
After detailing Kopec’s presence at the safe house, how they believed the murders had unfolded, and then how they suspected Harvath had been smuggled into Canada and then out to Russia via a private jet, he began to get into the pertinent details on their mission.
The NSA had picked up chatter about a Russian Air Force transport plane that had disappeared in bad weather. The plane had taken off from the same airport Harvath had landed at, shortly after his arrival. While coincidental, it wasn’t conclusive. That’s where the next piece of intelligence was so valuable.
Sources in Ukraine stated that right after the plane was reported missing, Kazimir Teplov, head of the Wagner Group, hastily assembled his best men and flew them, along with a ton of equipment, back to Russia. Specifically, they had flown to Alakurtti Air Base south of Murmansk and, according to the Finns, were there awaiting orders to begin some sort of operation. The kicker was that whatever these orders were, they had to do with the missing transport plane.
“U.S. Intelligence believes Harvath was on the plane that disappeared,” Nicholas had revealed. “We believe that Moscow is trying to keep the situation as quiet as possible, so instead of using active military and law enforcement personnel, they have brought in Russian mercenaries.”
It was one shocking revelation stacked upon another.
The United States Joint Special Operations Command had a quick reaction force known as a “Zero-Three-Hundred” team on standby in Germany. They were SEALs from DEVGRU, ready to HAHO jump in as soon as Harvath’s location was pinpointed.
As a demonstration of how serious the President was about getting Harvath back, U.S. F-22 Raptor all-weather stealth tactical fighters had been moved to a base in northern Sweden, and an LC-130 Hercules “Skibird” aircraft was being repositioned from Greenland.
The LC-130 was particularly special, as it was equipped with retractable skis, allowing it to land on snowfields, ice fields, and even frozen bodies of water. To assist in slushy snow or for short takeoffs, the Skibird was one of the few aircraft in the world to be equipped with rockets.
If they had to, they were prepared to send the LC-130 into Russian air space, escorted by F-22s, to bring Harvath home.
There was also talk of having the USS Delaware, a Virginia class nuclear-powered attack submarine, slip into the White Sea in order to insert an additional covert operations team just off the Kola Peninsula. Everything was being considered. Nothing was off the table.
The Carlton Group’s job was to employ a lighter touch. If they could get in, get Harvath, and get out without the Russians’ knowing, that was the President’s first choice.
Though he would have killed to be on the assignment, Nicholas’s physical limitations made him a liability. Snow and rugged terrain disagreed with him.
Besides, his role as de facto head of the organization meant he had to remain in D.C. and act as a liaison with all of the other players, including the White House, the Pentagon, the CIA, the FBI, and the NSA. He was thankful Rogers was helping to coordinate efforts through the Hostage Recovery Fusion Cell.
It had been decided, almost immediately, that a kinetic operation was called for. The Russians were unlikely to give Harvath up, no matter how much diplomatic pressure was applied.
Even so, Rogers had been tasked with coordinating a parallel track. With Nicholas’s help, they had come up with an aggressive strategy in hopes of negotiating Harvath’s release.
In the meantime, The Carlton Group team would head to Finland and prepare to cross over into Russia.
The passengers onboard the private jet looked like something out of a hard-core action movie.
In addition to Staelin and Chase, there was the former Fifth Special Forces Group operative Jack Gage—a massive six-foot-three man who clocked in at two hundred and fifty pounds. Between his physique and thick, dark beard, he looked like a pirate on steroids, or some sort of professional wrestler. He was a slave to chewing tobacco, a habit he surprisingly hadn’t picked up in the Army, but rather growing up in Minnesota, of all places.
There were also two no-longer-active United States Force Recon Marines on the team—Matt Morrison and Mike Haney. Morrison, a thirty-one-year-old from Alabama, was tall, good-looking, and always ready for a fight. His teammates liked to joke that he had been born with the looks of male stripper and the IQ of the pole. It was an unfair characterization, but as they at least recognized his superior physical attributes, he let the rest of their barbs slide.
The other Marine, Mike Haney, was never knocked for being dumb. In the field, the six-foot-tall leatherneck from Northern California was in charge of all their operational technology. Radios, drones, satellite phones—if it had a battery, Haney was responsible for it. At forty years old, with one of the longest service records on the team, he carried a wealth of experience. He was both an exceptional operator and highly skilled as a leader.
Rounding out the team were Tim Barton and Sloane Ashby. Barton had been with the Navy’s elite SEAL Team known as DEVGRU, formerly called SEAL Team Six. If Gage was built like a professional wrestler, Barton was built like a college wrestler. He was short—only five feet six—but barrel-chested and absolutely fearless. Whenever the team needed a volunteer, the redhead’s hand was always the first to go up. Somewhat OCD, he preferred everything to be in its place—a trait that earned him regular but good-natured ribbing from his teammates.
Sloane Ashby, like Harvath, had been handpicked by the Old Man. The moment he had met her, he knew he had to have her for The Carlton Group. As she was a very attractive blonde in her late twenties, most people never saw past her looks. She had graduated top of her class at Northwestern University, was an accomplished athlete, and had paid her own way through college via the ROTC.
When she enlisted in the Army, she had done so only on the guarantee that she would see combat. She was an amazing soldier. In fact, she had racked up so many kills in Afghanistan that she reached a certain a level of notoriety. The Taliban and Al Qaeda put a price on her head, and a popular magazine did an unauthorized feature on her. As soon as that happened, the Department of Defense pulled her from combat.
She fought to be allowed to go to Iraq, but the answer was an emphatic no. Instead, she was sent to Fort Bragg, where she helped to train Delta Force’s elite all-female unit known as the Athena Project. It was a waste to put such an exceptional operator out to pasture. When Reed Carlton offered her a chance to get back into the thick of the action, she jumped at it.
Sloane could kick doors with the best of them, and that was precisely what she did. Joining The Carlton Group was one of the best decisions she had ever made. From the moment she signed on, it had been everything the Old Man had promised it would be, and more. She was doing exactly the kind of work she had been born to do.
As the jet raced toward Finland, the team members wandered in and out of the galley to grab food, energy drinks, or cups of coffee. Some slept, some read books, and others watched movies or listened to music.
While there was much of the good-natured back-and-forth they had developed as a team, there was also something missing—Harvath.
He was their leader, and it felt not only odd not having him along, but it was also somewhat unnerving. The idea that he, an apex predator who had killed, they liked to joke, more people than cancer, could be captured was difficult to swallow. It meant that he was fallible, human.
He had been Superman to them. But Superman had been captured. And if Superman could be captured, none of them were safe.
They had to get him back—not only because he was their leader but because he was their brother. And because you didn’t let the fucking Russians, of all people, kidnap Superman. That wasn’t how things worked. Not in their world. If he was still alive, they were going to find him and bring him home.
CHAPTER 35
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RUSSIAN EMBASSY
WASHINGTON, D.C.
“Mr. Ambassador,” said SPEHA Rogers as he strode across the office and shook the man’s hand. “Thank you for seeing me.”
“I’m sorry for putting you off,” replied Egor Sazanov. “I didn’t want you to come all this way and not have answers for you.”
“I practically live at the State Department these days, so I’m not that far away.”
The Russian Ambassador smiled. “How about a drink?”
“I’d love one. Thank you.”
Rogers and Sazanov had previously worked together when a young American had been taken hostage by a Muslim terror organization in Chechnya. The SPEHA had found him to be a good partner, honest and diligent. He was charming and had an excellent command of English. Rogers could see him as Russia’s Foreign Minister or maybe even its President one day.
The Ambassador’s office was filled with heavy wooden furniture and dark, sky-blue Kuba rugs from Azerbaijan. Tiny flourishes of gold leaf could be seen along the ceiling. As worldly as the Ambassador was, there wasn’t a single book anywhere in the room.
He showed his guest to a seating area and gestured for his assistant to leave them alone and close the door behind him.
Sazanov was a fan of high-end bourbons and still had the special bottle Rogers had given him as a thank-you.